guilt can also be a refuge.

 culpability will always be more complicated than it looks.

 self-criticism is self-hypnosis.

 i live as a conquered city.

 the superego treats the ego like an object, not a person.

 it is intimated that the ego is the slave of the superego.

how have we become enslaved, and why have we consented?
 

and in what sense is the superego Freud's implied critique of the judeo-christian religions and their god?

internally there's a judge and a criminal but no jury. psychoanalysis attempts to bring the jury in.

to whom could the modern individual appeal in the privacy of his own mind?
 

where judgement is, there conversation should be.

 and we can add, where there is an absolute authority, there is a sabotaging of a conversation.

a malign parent harms in the guise of protecting, is moralistic rather than moral (the red father).

in the name of health and safety it creates a life of terror and self-estrangement (the red father state).
 

guilt is not necessarily a good clue to what one values; it is only a good clue to what (or whom) one fears.

not doing something because one will feel guilty if one does it is not necessarily a good reason not to do it.

 morality born of intimidation is immoral.

psychoanalysis was Freud's way of saying something new about the police and  the judiciary, the internal legal system.

but in Freud, the ego seems paltry, merely the slave, the doll, the ventriloquist's dummy, the superego's thing.

and the ego we think is more creative than that, and, using instinct, can become empowered, like a trickster coyote or shaman.
 

 for the sheer scale of the forbidden in this system is obscene.

so we proceed by paradox, indeed we find ways of getting pleasure from our restrictedness.
 

how, in Freud's view, has our virulent, predatory self-criticism become one of our greatest pleasures? how has it come about that we so much enjoy this picture of ourselves as objects, and as objects of judgement and censorship?

what is this appetite for confinement, for diminishment, for unrelenting, unforgiving, self criticism? Freud's answer is beguilingly simple: we fear loss of love.